Overview

abstract

Distributed constraints satisfaction problems (DisCSPs) have been studied for over a decade. The first distributed search algorithm was asynchronous backtracking, which is still the most studied. In the last few years, several new families of distributed search algorithms have been investigated and comparative experimental studies are encouraging. A natural extension to distributed constraints satisfaction is distributed constraints optimization. Stochastic search algorithms for solving DisCSPs, such as Distributed Breakout, have appeared a few years ago. Distributed stochastic search algorithms are naturally suitable for solving distributed optimization. In contrast, asynchronous search algorithms for distributed optimization have been proposed in recent years.